London

New York

B

Launching a new banking app brand

Our task involved building the foundations for a brand new money management app powered by Clydesdale Bank and Yorkshire Bank. The new brand B was to be launched on a new domain youandb.co.uk

Inspiration

Promoting innovation

The bank, like many other established traditional / regional ones, were being left behind by emerging offerings in meetings the needs of a younger tech-savvy audience.
The invested heavily in banking products supported by a smart feature rich app designed to appeal to this audience.
Our brief was to promote this genuine innovation in the digital spaces we find these audiences. A combination of deep audience insight, multi-disciplined creative thinking and fantastic team working helped us change perceptions of the bank amongst these target groups, attract more of them to the bank and ultimately turn them into customers.

Becoming 'un-bank'

We already knew that the bank had a proud history on innovation going right back to its foundation. We felt that gave it a platform but that it wouldn’t be enough to build the campaign around. New entrants and Fin Tech were already targeting the same audiences. So we needed to break away from legacy banking thinking. This new challenger offering needed an equally challenging campaign – one that broke free from the usual banking message and jargon. We needed to be ‘un-banky’.

Ideas

Integrating the campaign

B is a bank account that comes with and app to help millennials better manage their money. We quickly identified that just promoting this core benefit wouldn’t be enough. We learned that not everyone is necessarily aware of their need to better manage their money and what doing so could mean for them. So we devised a display and social advertising campaign that focused on millennial lifestyles and how simple adjustments to how they spend and save could mean they get to enjoy those lifestyles even more.
We carried the themes onto a new search-optimised website designed to expand on the advertising provocations and to draw user into an intuitive and easy application process.
In everything we did, we stripped out as much of the usual bank jargon as was allowed and employed a visual style and tone of voice not previously seen in the sector. The results were impressive.

Big Numbers

63% of new to brand customers were under 35

Our SEO campaign delivered 1st position for the letter ‘B’ within a couple of weeks of launching and nearly 14,000 visitors to the site (370% ahead of target), while our social campaign delivered over 30,000 visitors to the site (11% ahead of target).
A whopping 63% of new to brand customers were under 35, compared to 19% for the Clydesdale and Yorkshire brands.

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